1.1 A hundred years from now, seventeenth-century music specialists
(if they still exist) will surely wonder how their twentieth-century
counterparts could have failed to produce a complete Lully edition that
was anything like complete. Love him or loathe him, Jean-Baptiste Lully
has long been regarded as one of the towering figures of the Baroque
period, the creator of a style whose influence dominated French music
until the eve of the Revolution and spread well beyond the borders of
his adopted county. Yet the proportion of Lullys output published
in reliable editions is still remarkably small. In this regard, indeed,
many of his acknowledged masterpieces were better served in his own
day than they have been in ours.

1.2 The history of Lully publication in modern times,
at least in terms of collected works, got off to a fairly dismal start
in the 1870s with the appearance of eleven of his operas in the series Chefs-dŒuvre classiques de lopéra français.1 Given their inelegant presentation
and lack of inner orchestral parts, these reduced scores can have done
little to enhance Lullys reputation, still less encourage performance
or scholarly curiosity. More promising was the critical edition begun
by Henry Prunières, the Œuvres complètes produced
in the 1930s.2 But that monumental effort was left sadly unfinished at Prunièress
death in 1942, comprising only three of the operas, three volumes of comédies-ballets and two each of ballets and motets.3
In the late 1970s, there were plans for a collected edition to be published
by Broude Brothers. Three decades later, this brave venture has still
produced only a single, if admirable, volume of motets, published by
the Broude Trust in 1996.4

1.3 With a new century has come a new Œuvres complètes,
this one published by Georg Olms Verlag with two of the key figures
in current Lully research as general editors: Herbert Schneider, whose
thematic catalogue has done so much to facilitate and stimulate that
research,5 and Jérôme de La Gorce, author of numerous
studies on Lully and his period, among them the most comprehensive and
up-to-date biography.6
With several volumes already issued and a first-rate team of editors,
the Olms Œuvres complètes gives every sign of measuring
up to the challenge.

2.
The Edition

2.1 It is particularly good that the first opera to appear in
the new venture is Armide (1686), Lullys last completed tragédie en musique. This work, widely regarded as the
composers operatic masterpiece, has never previously been published
in an adequate modern edition. Apart from the unsatisfactory reduced
score in the Chefs-dŒuvre series noted above, we have had
to make do with Eitners full score of 1885, Frank Martins
version of 1924, and an undated vocal score prepared by Busser.7
None of these is as useful as the facsimiles of the first edition (Paris:
Christophe Ballard, 1686) available from Broude and on-line from the
University of North Texas.8

2.2 As editor of the present volume no one could be better qualified
than Lois Rosow. She first nailed her colors to the Armide mast
with her doctoral dissertation,9 a penetrating source-critical study of the operas 80-year performance
history which, among other things, prepared much of the ground for the
present edition. She has since refined and extended her research in
a series of publications, many with direct relevance to this project.
It is gratifying that such painstaking and perceptive scholarship should
reach its logical culmination in this exemplary critical edition.

2.3Armides very success both complicates and simplifies
the editorial process. Among the vast quantity of surviving materials
(none, alas, autograph), three sources emerge as especially important:
(a) the Ballard full score cited above, issued soon after the 1686 premiere
at the Paris Opéra (the Académie royale de musique); (b)
the first edition of the libretto, on sale at the time of the premiere;
and (c) a huge collection of the Opéras performing parts,
variously dating from different stages of the works history up
to its final revival there in 1766 and incorporating to a greater or
lesser extent revisions made during that period.10
As it happens, Lully had no hand in the great majority of these revisions:
he died little more than a year after the Armide premiere. Interesting
though such posthumous adaptations may be, they have limited relevance
to the present edition. (One could, however, envisage a separate editorial
project, suited to on-line publication, with hyperlinks among different
chronological stages of the works performance history.) The 1686
Ballard edition—a collaboration between composer, publisher, and
librettist (Philippe Quinault)—necessarily becomes the principal
musical source. As the editor has shown, however, two of the dessus
de violon parts in the collection of Opéra parts can be dated
to the time of the premiere. These, together with the first edition
of the libretto, have been judiciously used to supplement the principal
source or clarify ambiguous readings.

2.4 One aspect of the Ballard edition already revealed in Rosows
dissertation is the number of stop-press corrections preserved in surviving
exemplars. Further evidence of last-minute changes takes the form of
in-house manuscript corrections, these occurring in sufficient numbers
for the editor to be able to differentiate between at least seven of
Ballards scribes (their work carefully distinguished from annotations
by subsequent owners of the exemplars in question). She has thus been
able to posit a hypothetical ideal copy, one that takes
into account all relevant corrections. This in turn serves her editorial
goal—to reconstruct the state of Armide during the
initial production at the moment when the composer stopped adjusting
details and the work assumed a stable form (p. xxiv). The full
extent to which this represents the authorial intention
which Rosow aims to recover is impossible to judge. It is, however,
as near to that intention as anyone could now get, given the current
source situation. Everything we know about Lullys authoritarian
personality and working methods suggests that, even if he was not directly
responsible for this or that aspect of the Ballard score, he was happy
to approve the result. His paraphe, scribbled on the majority
of surviving exemplars, was in effect his imprimatur.

3.
Performing Armide

3.1 It goes without saying that this score of Armide is designed to be studied, analyzed and interpreted but, above all,
performed. The generous extent to which the performers needs are
taken into account is thus particularly pleasing. It is not merely that
a vocal score and orchestral parts will eventually be available. The
editor provides abundant help with the elusive matter of choral and
orchestral scoring. In this vitally important area, the Ballard edition
may often strike the non-specialist as frustratingly imprecise. Over
the past half-century or so, however, scholars have learned much about
how Lullys Opéra chorus, orchestra, continuo section and
dance troupe functioned, how his clef codes reveal much about instrumentation,
how woodwind doubling was usually organized, how the scoring of trio
interludes in choruses was adapted, and much else. Indeed, Rosow herself
has been in the vanguard of this research. Her introduction to the present
volume provides an authoritative five-page distillation of the current
state of our understanding of these matters (pp. xxvi–xxx), supported
by copious reference to further material. In the score, meanwhile, the
choral and instrumental labelling at the start of each movement makes
a neat typographical distinction between scoring that is explicit in
the Ballard score or can be confidently deduced from it, and scoring
judiciously derived from the set of parts. Further clarification of
specific passages in the score is usefully provided by on-page footnotes.

3.2 Another performance-related matter addressed by Rosow is
that of continuity. She stresses the seamless nature of Lullian opera,
where adjacent passages [flow] directly from one to another without
break (p. xxx). Where appropriate, her score conserves Ballards
simultaneous use of single and double barlines, a feature which performers
should find helpful and which should discourage the excessive sectionalization
that mars some performances of French Baroque opera and has given it
a reputation for being short-winded.

3.3 As to the music notation, this has been largely modernized
(p. xxv), but original meter signatures (essential to the performer)
have been retained, as have irregular rhythms associated with the flexible
dot. Details of the editorial method emerge during the course of the
editors long and informative introduction. Still, a useful feature
for future volumes would be an itemized list distinguishing all original
notational elements retained in the edition from those that have been
modernized. True, the General Preface (p. vi) includes brief remarks
to this effect, but nowhere in the edition is there a statement on,
for example, the treatment of accidentals. The user is left to deduce
that these have been modernized on the staves but not in the continuo
figuring.

4.
Continuo Figuring

4.1 This latter policy (retention in the figuring of flats and
sharps that would be modernized as naturals) seems questionable. As
a continuo player, moreover, I find it unhelpful. Admittedly, the player
can adjust to this system with little difficulty, and I am aware of
counter-arguments to do with transposition (though how relevant these
are in the present context is even more questionable). But in giving
out mixed messages—on-staff naturals versus flats or sharps in
the figuring—the edition appears illogical. The system can also
lead to misreadings, as on p. 40 (m. 124): had the single flat in the
figuring been modernized as a natural, the impossibility of this reading
would have been immediately obvious. From the context—a diminished
triad above a bass F-sharp—the correct reading must be [5]♭,
or better still, [5]♮.

4.2 This example raises the question of the extent to which
the continuo figuring requires editorial attention. Rosow wisely avoids
adding anything to the figuring except where this can be deduced or
corrected from parallel passages, in which case the additions are placed
in square brackets. There would, however, be an argument for completing
the figuring in cases where the interval in question is raised or lowered
by an on-staff accidental. A case in point occurs on p. 159 (m. 20),
where the figuring is given as 6 but where an accidental in the haute-contre
shows that it should be 6[♯].

4.3 One pleasing aspect of the figuring policy is that, in chords
involving tritones, the edition retains the accidentals in 4♯
and 5♭ even where the tritone is already, as Rosow neatly
puts it, a by-product of the key signature (p. 320). Like
many French Baroque composers but certainly not all,11 Lully maintained a distinction between
the perfect fourth and fifth (never figured with an accidental, whatever
the signature) and the tritone (always indicated by 4♯ or
5♭, whatever the signature). This useful distinction could,
indeed, have been exploited in the editorial process, as on p. 100 (m.
62), where the principal source has an erroneous 5♭. The Critical
Notes reveal that this figuring has been removed, yet it could equally
have been emended to a 5 without accidental. Like some of his contemporaries,
Lully sometimes use this figuring in a cautionary sense,
to warn the continuo team of the need for a perfect triad rather than
the first inversion which the falling third in the bass might lead them
(and, indeed, the unwary modern player) to expect.12

5.
The Libretto and Textual Underlay

5.1 Among its many invaluable features, the prefatory material
includes an edition by Jean-Noël Laurenti of Quinaults libretto.
Users with limited experience of reading seventeenth-century French
will appreciate the modernization of the spelling and most of the capitalization.
The original punctuation and poetic structure are, however, retained.

5.2 In the musical score, by contrast, the textual underlay
reproduces the original orthography except in cases of inconsistency.
Such underlay could well prove problematic to many performers. It will
be welcomed, of course, by those who wish to reconstruct period pronunciation
(a minority, I suspect), for whom the original spelling provides clues.
And native French singers who prefer modern pronunciation will have
no more difficulty with Quinault-Lully orthography than anglophones
would with, say, the Dryden-Purcell equivalent. But Lully performance
is not limited to French singers or the period-pronunciation lobby.
Individually, the modern pronunciation of spellings like connoistre (i.e., connaître), destournez (détourné),
or preveu (prévu) is easy enough to establish;
but given that each page may include several comparable examples, one
wonders at the cumulative rehearsal time occupied by such matters, especially
with non-specialist choral singers. By retaining the original orthography,
the new Lully edition allows the needs of a few (for whom a facsimile
is, after all, only a few mouse-clicks away) to take precedence over
the convenience of the many.

6.
Critical Apparatus

6.1 It is no surprise that Rosow, with her unrivalled experience
of the Armide sources, supports her editorial work with an exemplary
critical apparatus. The source discussion is a pleasure to read, even
if the point-size is a bit too small for comfort, and the dozen or so
pages of critical notes and associated materials are remarkably easy
to use. Details of emendations and other editorial decisions are admirably
pithy yet never ambiguous, while the task of locating the relevant passage
of music is facilitated by the scores use of running headlines
which include act/scene numbers.

7.
Conclusion

7.1 In short, Rosows sensitivity and her care over detail
will ensure that this Armide volume remains at the elbow of all
subsequent Lully editors, setting the standard for the remaining opera volumes
of the new Œuvres complètes. More important still,
her edition proves a trustworthy starting point for staged and concert
performances of this outstanding work. To see the fruits of her research
is gratifying enough: how much more so to hear them.

References

* Graham Sadler (a.g.sadler@hull.ac.uk)
is Professor of Musicology at the University of Hull. He is a member
of the editorial committee of the Rameau Opera omnia (Bärenreiter),
for which he is currently preparing a critical edition of Zaïs (1748).

10 Unlike a number of other French operas
of the Lully-Rameau period, no production score of Armide survives.
The term production score has been coined for scores
used by the batteur de mesure or others involved in the performance
of a given opera, these indicating the various cuts, additions and
other revisions made during successive rehearsals, performances,
and revivals.

11 See, for instance, Monsieur de Saint-Lambert, Nouveau Traité de laccompagnement du clavecin, de lorgue,
et des autres instruments, rev. ed. (Amsterdam: Estienne Roger,
[ca.1710]), 19, on the ambiguity in French continuo figuring of
chords involving a tritone. Although Saint-Lambert discusses only
the augmented fourth, his remarks apply equally to the diminished
fifth. For examples of the sort of figuring that Saint-Lambert would
have considered defective, see Robert Zappulla, Figured Bass
Accompaniment in France (Tournhout: Brepols, 2000), 121, 206.

12 A recent discussion of such cautionary
figuring is included in Graham Sadler, Idiosyncrasies in Charpentiers
Continuo Figuring: Their Significance for Editors and Performers,
in Les Manuscrits autographes de Marc-Antoine Charpentier,
ed. Catherine Cessac (Liège: Mardaga, 2006), 157–76.